Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/224

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN Barrymore took his place and continued the tour.

The Wallack's Theater of which I speak was not the house in which I first recited "Casey", but its predecessor, the second theater to bear the name, which stood in Thirteenth Street, and which closed its doors finally, by coincidence, on the day that Guiteau shot and fatally wounded President Garfield at the old Washington Railway station, July 2, 1881. The scene of "Casey's" first public appearance, now vanished with its two predecessors, was Wallack's at Broadway and Thirtieth Street, which was opened in the season of 1881-1882 with "The School for Scandal." The seats for the opening performance were sold at auction, bringing the then impressive sum of eleven thousand dollars, a sum which continues to impress my old-fashioned mind. Of the cast that night, I think that only Miss Rose Coghlan lives.

The Lambs lost another of its founders soon after Montague, Harry Beckett dying about 1880. He had come from England originally in 1873 with Lydia Thompson's British Blondes, the troupe from which the American burlesque show stems. The Blondes were more decorous than their name implies, but gentlemen